Email marketing benchmarks by industry and region for 2025

They show the performance of email campaigns across an industry, so you can compare your campaigns to your competitors and see where you shine—or where there’s room to grow. 

Using our internal data, we’ve compiled a list of email marketing benchmarks to help guide your strategy. Use these alongside your internal KPIs to assess your campaigns and refine your goals for 2025.👇

We analyzed data from 3,345,140 campaigns sent by 155,182 approved accounts from January to December 2024. We’ve included data about open rate, click rate, CTOR, and unsubscribes broken down by industry and region. We used the median value for all benchmarks. Check the relevant section to see an overview of the data as well as benchmarks for your industry.

First up, here are the overall email marketing benchmarks across all industries. Use these to see how your campaigns compare against all the accounts in our dataset. You can then dig deeper into the industry-specific data in the sections below.

Open rate: 42.35%

% of the total recipients that opened the email.

Click-to-open rate: 5.63%

% that clicked in the email out of the total recipients who were delivered and opened it.

Click rate: 2.00%

% that clicked in the email out of the total recipients who were delivered it.

Unsubscribe rate: 0.08%

% of the total recipients who clicked the unsubscribe link.

Open rate shows the percentage of the total campaign recipients who opened the email. The median email open rate across all campaigns in our dataset was 42.35%. Email open rates by industry ranged from 22.57% to 59.70%.

Email open rate by industry

The industry with the highest email open rate was religion, which had an open rate of 59.70%. This was followed by hobbies (53.33%) and travel and non-profit (53.21%). 

The open rate for the religion industry was over 6% higher than any other! It’s easy to guess why: People are passionate about religion and these messages may also contain useful information on topics like sermon times and events. The hobby and non-profit industries are also topics people enjoy reading about. 

This year’s worst-performing industry was travel and transportation, which had an open rate of 22.57%. Following this were publishing (30.91%) and e-commerce (31.08%). 

Check the full dataset below for all our open rate benchmarks by industry. 

Email open rate by region

This year, we also broke down email open rates by region so you can compare your email marketing strategy performance to others in your geographical area. 

At 46.34%, campaigns sent in Australia had the highest open rate, while those sent in LATAM had the lowest, at 30.67%. We included Poland as its own category since we have a large number of Polish customers.

See the full breakdown below. 

Email click rate (also known as click-through rate) shows the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link in your message. 

The average email click rate across all email marketing campaigns was 2.00%. Clicks rates across industries ranged from 0.77% to 4.36%.

Considering how Apple’s Privacy changes impact open rate and CTOR, click rate is currently the most accurate indicator of email newsletter engagement since it’s not reliant on tracking opens.

However, email click rate is significantly impacted by having links to click on. If you don’t include many links in your emails, your click rate will be low, but it doesn’t mean people aren’t reading your content. 

Email click rate by industry

The industry with the highest email click rate was hobbies. An impressive 4.36% of recipients clicked on these messages. This was followed by government (4.31%), and media (4.02%).

Hobbies combined a high open rate with a high click rate, so brands in this industry are clearly doing something right!

The worst-performing industry according to click rate was travel and transportation, which had a click rate of just 0.77%. This was followed by the marketing and advertising (1.11%) and restaurant industries (1.13%).

See the full dataset below to check the benchmarks for your industry. 

Email click rate by region

Emails sent in Australia had the highest click rate at 2.35%, while those sent in LATAM had the lowest at 1.09%.

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) shows the percentage of the people who open your email and also click on it. The average email click-to-open rate across all email marketing campaigns was 5.63%. Click-to-open rates across industries ranged from 2.93% to 10.71%.

CTOR is a useful metric because it can show how engaging your email content is. A low open rate with a high CTOR suggests that the people who open your emails find the content relevant. In this situation, increasing your open rate would likely boost overall campaign performance.

Email click-to-open rate by industry

The industry with the highest CTOR is media. An impressive 10.71% of people who open these emails also click on them. It’s likely that these emails perform well because media companies tend to fill their campaigns with links to stories on their websites, giving people who open the messages plenty to click on. The lesson? Add more clickable content to your emails if you want to increase CTOR!

The second and third-placed industries are government (10%) and hobbies (9.18%). The 3 industries with the lowest CTOR are restaurants (2.93%), marketing and advertising (3.32%), and real estate (3.47%).

See the full dataset below to check the benchmarks for your industry. 

Email click-to-open rate by region

CTOR rankings by region don’t have the same variance as when broken down by industry.  Emails sent in Poland had the highest click-to-open rate at 6.90%, while those sent in Africa had the lowest at 4.06%. 

Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who click the unsubscribe link in your email. The benchmark unsubscribe rate across all campaigns was 0.08%. This is good news for email marketers since it shows that only a tiny percentage of people unsubscribe when you send an email.

Email unsubscribe rate by industry

The industry with the highest unsubscribe rate was authors, at 0.21%. Photo and video (0.20%) and home and garden (0.19%) were second and third highest. While the highest in our dataset, these rates still mean that only between 1.9 and 2.1 people out of 1,000 recipients unsubscribe. 

At the other end of the scale, 9 industries had a 0.00% unsubscribe rate: non-profit, travel and transportation, sports, manufacturing, religion, coaching, government, insurance, and public relations.

See the full dataset below to check the benchmarks for your industry. 

Unsubscribe rate by region

Australia had the highest unsubscribe rate of any region. At 0.13% this was over 50% higher than our benchmark. Australia also had the highest open rate, which makes sense since people can only unsubscribe if they open your message.

Africa had the lowest unsubscribe rate at 0.00%. It’s noteworthy that Africa had far fewer campaign sends than the other regions in our dataset. 

Whether your current metrics are falling below the industry standards or you want to outshine the competition: Here are 4 ways to start improving your email success metrics right now.

1. Increase email open rate

The first thing you can do to improve your open rate is create more eye-catching email subject lines. Highlight why the recipient should open your email in under 40 characters so people can see the offer. 

You can also experiment with personalization, using numbers in your headlines or trying keywords that tend to correlate with high open rates. Find out more about these tactics for writing great subject lines here. 

Also, look at your past best-performing subject lines to see which resulted in a good open rate. Or run subject line A/B tests to pit different subject lines against each other to see what works. 

Segmenting your email list into smaller groups can seriously improve open rates. This helps you send the most relevant content to each subscriber group so they are more likely to open.

MailerLite customers can also use our new Smart sending tool for an open rate boost. This uses subscriber data to send your emails at the exact time each person on your list is most likely to engage with the message. The result is more opens and campaign success.

Another thing to bear in mind is your email cadence. You can fine-tune the number of emails you send to generate higher open rates. Some audiences might prefer weekly newsletters, while others want to hear from you daily. Get to know your subscribers and find that optimal sending frequency.  

How to improve email open rate:

• Personalize the subject line

• A/B test different variations of the subject line (length, tone, CTA, emoji)

• Add an email preheader and give people a compelling reason to open

• Try different sender name variations

• Test combinations of subject line and sender name with multivariate testing

• Send your email campaign from a different email address

• Experiment with sending on different days of the week or at different sending times to work out the best time to send your email

• Clean up inactive subscribers to reduce the percentage of subscribers who ignore your messages

2. Increase email clicks

The easiest way to get people to click on your content is to add more links for them to click on! You’ll likely see a big boost when you do this if you don’t currently include many links. 

Consider linking to blog posts, articles, products, webinar videos, or other useful resources. Add the link to text or use a button to make it stand out.  

Also consider adding more interactive content for your subscribers to click on. Using product boxes, surveys, quizzes, and galleries in your emails can encourage subscribers to interact with your messages. Discover more tips for boosting email engagement rates here.

If your email includes an offer, use a strong call-to-action to motivate readers to click through. You can even use dynamic content settings to show relevant content and offers to different subscriber groups. 

Your email analytics also play a key role in optimizing email click rate over time. Check the most-clicked content to see what people are most likely to interact with and then optimize the content of future messages. 

Finally, consider using A/B or multivariate testing to send out multiple versions of your email content to see which variant leads to the most clicks. 

How to improve email click-to-open rate:

• Segment subscribers into smaller, more relevant groups

• Improve the relevancy of your content

• Double-check if the subject line reflects your email content

• Design buttons and links so they're prominently displayed

• Make the copy and CTA more engaging

• Use dynamic content to show relevant offers

• Offer (better) incentives for people to click

• A/B test different email scripts to see what resonates with your audience

• Give subscribers more things to click on! Add blog post links, surveys, quizzes, resource libraries, or anything else that is useful to your target audience

3. Decrease unsubscribes

You can’t get rid of unsubscribes entirely but you can keep them to a minimum by following these best practices:

• Use double opt-in for signups to ensure that only people who want to receive your emails join your list. This will also decrease your email bounce rate

• Send your campaigns more frequently to build a relationship with readers, and stick to a regular schedule

• Regularly clean your email list with an email validation tool

• Make your email content more relevant to your subscribers' interests and needs

• Make sure your subject line reflects the content in your email so you meet the reader's expectations

Minimizing unsubscribes will also keep your email deliverability healthy since it shows that you’re only sending to people who want to hear from you. 

How did your email metrics compare to those in your industry? Knowing the email benchmarks of competing businesses helps you set up smarter goals and work to improve your email campaigns.

In the spirit of "New Year, New Me(trics)", take a moment to decide on one email metric to improve this year. Choose something that relates to your business goals and is unlikely to be impacted by Apple Privacy changes. Share your goal publicly in the comments below to keep yourself accountable. 💪

Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated with new benchmark data.